Mark and I shared our morning coffee (tea for me) chatting about the tangible heartbreak in the world and the problems that can’t be solved with pat answers, rhetoric, judgments or opinions. Who cares about opinions? As the saying goes they are like assholes, everyone’s got one.

We live in a world where we see a regular occurrence of pushing those we disagree with or don’t understand outside the circle. Annihilating those we don't want to see with words or physical harm has become commonplace. And yet placing oneself above the rest of humanity is the most arrogant and shortsighted perspective imaginable, considering we all come from the same source.

We should shutter from the arrogance that pits one man against another and the blindness that elevates one above the next, simultaneously overlooking the weakness in ourselves.

We actually need to get to know people that are different than we are. We need to feel the pain in our neighbor’s life to understand the ways in which we are not so different.

Where opinions and judgments fail, Martin Luther King Jr. profoundly stated, “Love is the only force capable of turning an enemy into a friend.”

This week alone, I felt the pain in the heart of a friend navigating life as a gay man. I heard and felt a wife’s ache as she reluctantly faces the finality of burying her husband. I saw mothers tormented over the treatment of their children and the judgment that sized them up into right or wrong, good or bad, insider verses outsider. I felt their pain as a human being and in some way could relate it to my own. I had the beautiful opportunity to see human beings.

We need not think it’s our job to fix or set another person straight, so that they come into alignment with what we believe. Who do we think we are?

Taking the time to see an individual and loving them, as a fully loved and accepted child of God is far superior to any opinion. Love makes ordinary people into superheroes.